J.M. Johnson examines how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world. She is very very deliberate with her word choices. She constantly hammers her points throughout the text (specifically - gender, intimacy, and kinship). She does a great job of building her narrative. I enjoyed how she pushed 'imagined geography' beyond the bounds of land or landscapes to the body. She says the body is a geography.

Johnson says her narrative is not not an biography or micro-history, but a history practicing the same muddy freedom the women studied. It is a history of black women who experienced the contours of bondage and freedom as slavery and the slave trade began to unfold.

Her applied theory of null values was fasinating! She says Null values offers opportunity before reading along the bias grain for marking this space of indeterminacy. By identifying archival silences as null values surfaces slave owners and officials as responsible for missing and unacknowledged black life in the archive but resists equating the mission or in-applicable information with black death.

By focusing on how using the rule of intimacy and kinship played out highlights black women's everyday understanding of freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their children. It was a great book. I highly highly recommend.